Our food system is still messed up, says 'Diet for a Small Planet' author

Wednesday

Mar 8, 2017 at 3:07 PMMar 8, 2017 at 3:07 PM

Nancy Olesin @WickedLocalArts

FRAMINGHAM - Forty-six years after she published a book that opened the nation’s eyes to a different way of eating and thinking about food, Frances Moore Lappe says we continue to see the problem of world hunger the wrong way.

“We are still creating a great deal of suffering out of plenty,” the social activist and author of "Diet for a Small Planet" said during a Feb. 23 lecture at Framingham State University’s McCarthy Center.

Lappe was just 24 when she wrote “Small Planet,” which has sold more than 3 million copies since it was first published in 1971. Today, at 73, she’s the author of 19 books on world hunger, including “Daring Democracy” to be published this fall, and she continues to teach her message about how a plant-based diet and cooperative arrangements can help spread the world’s food wealth.

We mistakenly see the world through a “lens of scarcity,” Lappe said. The world’s farmers grow more than enough food to feed the earth’s 7.5 billion people. More food is grown than ever before - 2,900 calories per day per person, including 80 grams of protein, 16 more grams than most people need per day - but the American meat-centered diet and inefficient way products are distributed causes food poverty, she said.

“Why are we together creating a world none of us as individuals would choose?” Lappe asked.

Lappe’s lecture, titled “Food, Democracy and Justice - Why What We Eat Matters,” came at an opportune time for students, said Framingham State President F. Javier Cevallos, in his introductory remarks.

“Food is probably the most basic social justice issue,” said Cevallos, a native of Ecuador who moved to Puerto Rico when he was 14 and is trying to bring a more global perspective to campus. Lappe’s talk was one in a series of lectures in the President’s Distinguished Lecture Series at FSU.

In addition to her books, Lappe, with her daughter Anna Lappe, founded the Small Planet Institute in Cambridge which looks at the root causes of environmental devastation and injustice in the global food system. The two have traveled the world studying agricultural societies to discover ways farming and distribution can be healthier, more cooperative and have less impact on the environment.

Growing food for Americans’ meat-centered diet takes a huge toll on the environment. “Each year, we are losing the equivalent of four pickup trucks of topsoil for every person on earth, and it takes 200 years to create 1 inch of topsoil,” she said.

Around the world, 1 in 4 children are stunted by malnutrition, causing lifelong harm, and one-fifth of maternal deaths are linked to iron deficiency, Lappe said. In the United States, we feed fewer people per acre than China or India, she added.

Lappe outlined what she calls “Ten Myths” about world hunger. Myth one is that there is “too little food, too many people.”

“Food scarcity is not the problem, but the scarcity of real democracy protecting people’s access to nutritious food is a huge problem," Lappe said on her website.

The idea of “survival of the fittest” in Charles Darwin’s 1859 “On The Origin of Species,” considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology, is another myth, Lappe said. Darwin actually wrote nine versions of “Origins,” she said, and in one version he wrote that species that are the fittest to survive are those who learn to cooperate.

Access to adequate food is a human right, Lappe said, and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of too few is dangerous. The free market system has created an an inefficient agricultural system that has terrible effects on the climate and has also failed to end world hunger, she continued.

Lappe said students and others may be worrying since the November election, but said she felt hopeful despite the outcome. “We are living in an extraordinary time. … There’s extraordinary fear; we feel the foundations of democracy are shaking.”

She urged people to step out of their comfort zones and to challenge themselves to foster what she calls “Daring Democracy.” Today’s political chaos may create opportunities for individuals and communities to do good things, she said.

“It’s such a time to be alive. There is such a possibility for change,” Lappe said.

To learn more about Frances Moore Lappe and "Diet for a Small Planet," visit www.smallplanet.org.

Daily News and Wicked Local arts editor Nancy Olesin can be reached at nolesin@wickedlocal.com.